An internet-based PBL teaching case system with multiple viewpoints for medical education

In medical education, teaching cases are usually prepared by domain experts from their individual viewpoints. The irrelevance of such teaching cases not only contradicts with the fact that a practical case study is usually related to more than one disciplines, but also may degrade students' learning performance. In this paper, we describe a medical web-based system called HINTS, which features its design and implementation of cross-discipline teaching cases. This study proposes how an Internet-based PBL (Problem-Based Learning) teaching case should be presented to the students such that it provides an integrated, effective, and efficient means for them to develop an overall perspective and knowledge of patient care problems. Furthermore, the system made use of the concept of the document-view architecture, but was implemented with a rule-based mechanism that is different from those documented in the literature. Based on our experiments, the system turns out to be a very successful one. The system has been installed in National Cheng Kung University Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan for trial purpose. Some experiments are conducted to verify the advantages of designing teaching cases crossing different disciplines.